Nüshu

Tuhua

The southern part of Hunan Province (including Yongzhou City and Chenzhou City) has a complex dialect distribution and a large dual dialect area. People in the counties and cities in this area usually speak Southwest Mandarin outwardly and Pinghua and/or Tuhua inwardly, and the Tuhua spoken in each county is not uniform, making it difficult to communicate with each other.

For Yongzhou City in Hunan Province, the dialects of Xiangnan Tuhua in Yongzhou City can be divided into the Southern dialect and the Northern dialect, among which the dialect spoken in Jiangyong County belongs to the Southern dialect, which consists of Chengguan, Xiacengpu, Taochuan, and Songbai subdialects.

According to He Yanxin, the inheritor of the Nüshu script, her grandmother was born in Shangjiangxu Town, Jiangyong County, and later married in Xianglinpu Town, Dao County. When her grandmother sang and read the Nüshu books, she used neither the Shangjiangxu Tuhua nor the Xianglinpu Tuhua, but the Chengguan Tuhua of the Chengguan subdialect, because the Chengguan language was “good to listen to and more elegant,” implying the Yayan status of the Chengguan Tuhua in the Nüshu community.

The phonological phenomenon of Xiangnan Tuhua is complex, with many internal variations. Although it is possible to find some commonalities or similarities, such as the disappearance of all Middle Chinese plosive codas, the residual phenomenon of the Zhi group being pronounced as the Duan group and the Fei group as the Bang group, and the pronunciation of the Xi initial as fricative, it is difficult to find the kind of intrinsic characteristics that unite the whole of Xiangnan Tuhua. Therefore, similar to Yuebei Tuhua, Guinan Pinghua and Guibei Pinghua, the categorization of Xiangnan Tuhua has been an unsettled and controversial issue.

Nüshu Script

The Nüshu script is used by people in and around Jiangyong County to record the Xiangnan Tuhua, where Nüshu can refer to the writing system, poetic articles, and textual materials (including scrolls, handkerchiefs, fans, etc.) on which this script is written. The name Nüshu comes from its usage by local women to write down things and express their feelings.

There are various stories about the origin of Nüshu, including Yùxiù Tànqīnshū (in Zhōngguó Nǚshū Jíchéng, pp. 499-504), which introduces the story of Hu Yuxiu, a concubine in the Song Dynasty, who adapted Chinese characters to create Nüshu to write letters of complaint to her family. The Daoguang version Yǒngzhōu Fǔzhì (p. 269) and the Guangxu version Yǒngmíng Xiànzhì (p. 525) describe the stories of Hu Xianhe and Hu Yuxiu, and now Jingtian Village in Jiangyong County has the ruins of the Yushulou building.

In 1954, Zhou Shuoyi of the Jiangyong County Cultural Center met Hu Chizhu, a writer of Nüshu, who taught Zhou Shuoyi to write Nüshu and created Yíngxíngzì Gē, which was later included with its translation in Jiāngyǒngxiàn Jiěfàng Shínián Zhì, the first work on Nüshu to be published in the public domain. In 1982, Zhou Shuoyi renamed Yíngxíngzì Gē as Nǚshū zhī Gē, which was included in Jiāngyǒngxiàn Wénwùzhì, which began to attract the attention of a wider group of people. In 1983, Gong Zhebing published “A Report on the Investigation of a Special Script — A Record in Yao Mountain, South Hunan Province” (in the Journal of the Central University for Nationalities, Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, 1983, No. 3, pp. 122-128), which was the first academic paper for Nüshu to be published. After that, Nüshu began to receive sustained attention from scholars in the fields of linguistics, philology, sociology, and anthropology.

Système Idéographique or Système Phonétique

The terms biǎoyì wénzì and biǎoyīn wénzì have at least two meanings, one functional and one cognitive. The functional concepts focus on the correspondence between language and script, and the criterion for determining whether a writing system is functionally ideographic (système idéographique) or functionally phonetic (système phonétique) is whether the meanings are strongly involved in the correspondence between language and script. The cognitive concepts focus on the components of the characters, and the criterion for determining whether a writing system is cognitively ideographic or cognitively phonetic is whether the components used to indicate meanings or categories are introduced.

In the case of Chinese characters, for example, from a functional point of view, whether the Modern Han script is functionally ideographic or not depends on the language in which it is recorded. When it is used to record Mandarin, Zhuang, Buyei, Korean, etc., it is clearly functionally ideographic, whereas when it is used in the Manyōgana, since the meanings do not intervene in the correspondence to create opposites, it is considered functionally phonetic. From a cognitive point of view, since the components to indicate meanings and to indicate pronunciation are introduced, no matter what language it is recorded in, the Modern Han script is always considered cognitively ideographic.

The data in the following table are taken from Nǚshū Yòngzì Bǐjiào and Zhōngguó Nǚshū Héjí, where the number after the character indicates the number of times it appears in that volume. According to Nǚshū Yòngzì Bǐjiào, meanings intervene to create oppositions in correspondences, and such oppositions are prevalent in different Nüshu writers, so the Nüshu script is functionally ideographic. In addition, since some studies have pointed out that Nüshu is designed according to the Modern Han script and that there is a correspondence between their components, it can be inferred that Nüshu is also cognitively ideographic.

Nüshu Character Set

In August 2007, Professor Zhao Liming’s team at Tsinghua University submitted the first proposal for the encoding of the Nüshu script to WG2 on behalf of China National Body (WG2 N3287). In the process of constructing the Nüshu character set, Professor Zhao’s team established a series of chains of evidence to make each Nüshu character traceable. First, the team spent two years selecting, compiling and organizing 650 documents from nearly 1,000 original Nüshu materials, scanning, photocopying and publishing the Zhōngguó Nǚshū Héjí. Second, the character frequency statistics of the pronunciation, meanings and corresponding Chinese character information of each Nüshu character in these documents were conducted, and the Nǚshū Yòngzì Bǐjiào was published. And third, the results of the character frequency statistics were summarized, the standardized characters were selected, and the Nǚshū Dúběn was published. The head characters of the repertoire in Nǚshū Dúběn correspond to the characters, resulting in the Nüshu character set in Unicode 10.0.

It should be noted, however, that this is not a complete character set from a bibliographic perspective. In addition to the higher frequency characters in Nǚshū Yòngzì Bǐjiào that are not encoded, there are at least two other important sources that should be considered. The first source is the repertoire written by He Yanxin and included in Chūgoku Onnamoji Kenkyū, and the second source is the supplementary repertoire suggested by Nüshu writers.

Typefaces

Below are two Nüshu typefaces that I was involved in developing. The first considers the wooden sticks as writing instruments and can be called a sans-serif typeface; the second considers the Chinese brushes as writing instruments and can be called a serif typeface.

Noto Traditional Nüshu

Stylistic Design. By researching the literature and cultural relics of Nüshu, analyzing the collection of the Hunan Museum, and studying the handwriting of some Nüshu natural inheritors, it is not difficult to find out that traditional Nüshu is usually written with hard pens such as pencils, fountain pens, and ballpoint pens, which results in Nüshu forms with consistent thick and thin strokes, and occasional texts written with brush pens that are handled spontaneously. This led the design team to adopt the sans-serif style as the traditional style when starting to design the typeface.

Mixed Design. To be compatible with the Noto Sans family, the basic characteristics of Noto Traditional Nüshu were determined by analyzing various aspects such as weight, stroke endpoints, and writing speed in Noto Sans CJK SC and Noto Sans. The dots in traditional Nüshu are non-directional and very different in design from the dots in Chinese characters, so the style of the dot strokes should be closer to Latin than to Chinese.

Design for Vertical Layout. In order to mix Nüshu characters with Chinese characters without changing the line metrics, the line metrics in Noto Traditional Nüshu are aligned with Noto Sans CJK SC. Due to the long and thin body proportions of Nüshu characters, all Nüshu characters are designed to exceed the square body box, resulting in the inevitable overlap of text between characters when text is set vertically, unless special treatment is given. Therefore, when creating a font project, it is necessary to create a set of vertical-specific glyphs with vertical metrics. And when the text direction is changed to vertical, the conversion process must also be written into the appropriate OpenType features to be called correctly.

Nyushu

In modern times, Nüshu characters tend to be written more artistically, and people begin to use Chinese brushes to write and create, paying attention to the handling of the brush strokes. Hu Xin, the ambassador of Jiangyong Nüshu, worked with Chinese brushes, as did Wang Chengxi, who pioneered the genre of Henan Nüshu calligraphy. At the same time, this shows that Nüshu calligraphy is gradually attracting the attention of artists from other provinces, especially women calligraphers, and is gradually becoming trans-regional.

The contours of the glyphs were first designed with reference to Nǚshū Guīfànzì Shūfǎ Zìtiè, and then some glyphs were corrected according to Nǚshū Dúběn and Nǚshū Yòngzì Bǐjiào. In addition, based on the calligraphic and encoding materials, contextual variants and alternate variants are provided in the typeface.